DAN RATHER'S CLOCKWORK ORANGE

WHAT IS THE FREQUENCY, KENNETH?  AND CAN YOU HELP SOLVE THE BARTHELME/RATHER RIDDLE?

Alexander DeLarge

By Alexander DeLarge, CPW News Service

     Eric Mink of the Huff Post (11/5/15) gives us the reason why whoever was handling Dan Rather's law suit against CBS for not backing up the Rather and Mapes' Ellington Field story should also have been sued for mismanagement of Rather's legal case. CBS's "investigation" into the Ellington Field memos of GWB was prejudicial from the start and CBS was a party to another Bush bamboozle. Here is what Mink says: CBS' corporate chiefs then hired a two-person panel to investigate how their own news division produced the report. One of the two people was Dick Thornburgh, a former U.S. Attorney General appointed by President Ronald Reagan and reappointed by President George H.W. Bush, George W.'s dad. Thornburgh's law firm staff handled the leg work and prepared questioning sessions that, oddly, were not transcribed.
     "This was a 'slam dunk' for a Rather victory in the courtroom....any normal courtroom! The only...only conclusion... that can be reached is that Rather's attorney, and Rather by association, are either idiots, another example of simple pedestrian morons, or were part of the Bush bamboozle.  He's no moron.   Mary Mapes....if she was not part of the bamboozle should have been asking....'What is the frequency, Kenneth?'" said Melvin “Racehorse” Bell Ayes of San Francisco, California.

     In February 2011, Paul Limbert Allman wrote “The Frequency: Solving the Riddle of the Dan Rather Beating” for Harper’s Magazine.  In 1986 Dan Rather was viciously beaten on Park Avenue, New York City by an assailant who asked him “What is the frequency, Kenneth?”     The incident brought the charge from some quarters that Donald Barthelme, an award winning Houston, Texas post-modern writer and Director of the Dominique De Menil funded Houston Contemporary Museum of Art, had arranged for the beating.  Some claimed this an illogical assertion. It was never proven. Why would Barthelme have arranged it?  A PR ploy for his book that mentions "what is the frequency?"  A warning to Dan Rather from their old stomping ground where Barthelme was reporter for the Houston Post amid the petro-chem refineries of Houston and Ellington Field where the original Bush "memos" originated according to Texas Air National Guard secretary Marian Carr Knox? In 1986 the interest in the Ellington Field Bush memos had not yet surfaced.  Or had it?  The original memos were written in 1972, but Mary Mapes' claimed that she did not know about them until 1999 while former Texas Lieutenant Governor, Ben Barnes, claims he wrote letters that initially secured the GWB appoints in 1968. 
     Both Barthelme and Rather had been reporters in Houston and Barthelme’s writings had contained the phrase “What is the frequency?” along with a character named “Lather”.   The Dan Rather assailant, William Tager, would later be convicted of murdering an NBC technician, but some witnesses claimed he called Rather "Kenneth Burrows" or "Burroughs"....leading one to wonder why Tager didn't say "What's the frequency, William?"....as in  the adopted fellow southern and post-modern writer (if you consider the "Beat" writers post-modern), William S. Burroughs, grandson of William Seward Burroughs, founder of the Burroughs Co. that became Sperry and Univac and friend of many considered to be one of the American "business plotters" of the 1930's....Burroughs, Harvey Firestone, Henry Ford, John Rockefeller, Charles Lindberg. Some say Prescott Bush, GHWB's father, as evidenced by his Fritz Thyssen and Nazi-connected Union Bank affiliations at the time. 

      William Burroughs, not unlike Tager, had an affinity for guns and shot and killed his wife while playing a game of William Tell's "knock an apple from your head" in Mexico.   The "frequency"?   That is anyone’s guess. 

Barthelme, Burroughs, Heller,
Vonnegut and Thompson's post-modernism
meets Beats and Gonzos in a whirling mix of
guns, mind benders and the madness of
endless warfare.  Did this lead to
Thompson's epiphany in
Kingdom of Fear?
(David S. Wills is Editor of Beatdom Magazine)

 
     All of it is really, but the "business plotters" have received significant post World War II attention from many quarters in as much as their actions are related to the testimony of two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner, Marine General Smedley Darlington Butler, who complained of a proposed Fascist coup that would have led a half-million-soldier army of U.S. veterans to unseat Franklin Delano Roosevelt had their ambitions been realized.  It was this plan from which a thread runs to Donald Trump's recent tweet of photos of the Bush clan and a Nazi swastika.  General Smedley Butler, no stranger to literature, wrote as a result of the experience a book, War Is A Racket, in 1935. 
     The first Pulitzer Prize winning Latin American, son of Cuban immigrants, Oscar Hijuelos, was a graduate of City College of New York which bestowed on Wall Street financier and backer of the revolutionary Frasch Process for sulfur and gunpowder making, Bernard Baruch, an honorary doctorate. Hijuelos visited with Donald Bartheleme, William S. Burroughs and Joseph Heller along the same office hallway at City College of New York, his alma mater.   The three writers were, according to Hijuelos, there at City College at the same time.  He confirms this in his 2011 book, Thoughts Without Cigarettes: A Memoir. 
     These three literary standouts were together at the same time giving them a ring-side seat on what Joseph Heller would describe as the Catch-22 of the racket of warfare, much of which was fueled by the petrochemical industry in Houston, Texas and the nearby Freeport-McMoran Company that depended on the Frasch process to fuel the U.S. arsenal and on whose board was Henry Kissinger whose close associate at Kissinger & Associates was L. Paul Bremer the first head of the Iraqi Provisional Government.  These facts come to the aide of our understanding the exportation of wars to the Middle East about which General Wesley Clark has said there was a clear Neo-Con agenda after the 2000 election, but it also informs our understanding of the Rather/Barthelme/Lombardi place in the Houston political constellation, the arrival of Iran-Contra fire-waller who investigated the Harris County Medical Examiner's office for corruption, Michael Bromwich, and the arrival of the war salesman who fashioned the Tillman and Lynch stories for the Washington Post as well as co-author with Paula Broadwell of All In: The Education of General David Petraeus, Vernon Loeb.  Loeb became editor of the Houston Chronicle while his boss at the WP, Steve Coll, became the Henry Luce Professor of Journalism and Chair of the Columbia University School of Journalism in New York City.
     "Add to this amazing trio of writers, Barthelme, Burroughs and Keller, the certainty that author Kurt Vonnegut was not far away as evidenced by his appearance in Lapham's The American Ruling Class and  Vonnegut's book, Slaughterhouse Five, a novel like Catch-22 that normalizes the inevitability of endless warfare....leading to the canonization of Cormac McCarthy's book, Blood Meridian, by Yale's gatekeeper on the U.S. literary canon, Harold Bloom,  and we see a shift from the prophetic critiques of society in the writings of Sinclair Lewis or Vance Packard, or a century earlier writer....Herman Melville.... whose works like Moby Dick or Billy Budd warned against fanatic pursuit of warfare's injustice that would pull down the guilty and innocent alike.   McCarthy would pull off the mask and thin veneer of civilization by declaring in Blood Meridian "War is God".....music to the ears of the war profiteers!
     "If you have not seen Kurt Vonnegut together with CBS's longtime news anchor and mentor and predecessor of Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite, in the documentary by Louis Lapham, The American Ruling Class (7:15 following)  you have missed a good part of the cultural milieu within which Barthelme, Burroughs, Heller and Vonnegut wrote.   In a similar documentary, Born Rich,  is the heir of the Eli Whitney fortune whose family not only owns New York's Grand Central Station, but the Whitney Museum where Mark Lombardi's work on Iran-Contra was ceremoniously hung in a display of politically charged commentarial artwork.  It was a strange choice for the Whitney.  John Hay 'Jock' Whitney, a member of the same family, had also taken an interest in filmmaking by backing the Hollywood blockbuster, Gone With the Wind.  That film mythologized the U.S. Civil War in a way that took our eyes off of the real motive for that war....the rush by the railroads to the Pacific and the China Trade based on silk and opium," said Shirley Locke Holmes who noted that 'Jock' Whitney was married to Barbara Cushing a daughter of the powerful Boston China Trade merchants and opium importers, the John Perkins Cushing and Caleb Cushing families.
     After World War II Bernard Baruch whose father, Simon, was a surgeon for Confederate General Robert E. Lee,  was visited by both Winston Churchill and Dwight D. Eisenhower at Baruch's Park Avenue apartment near the site of Rather's beating by Tager.   Simon Baruch's influence in New York can be seen in his support of public bathhouses and "Hydrotherapy" that was evolving, then fading, at the same time as opioids for surgery was championed by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. who coined the word "anesthetic" and whose son was the leading legal mind on the U.S. Supreme Court just as the nation's drug and patent medicine laws were being forged in the U.S. courts with supplies being managed in the Middle East's Golden Crescent....Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Turkey.... but for which a competitor had evolved....the Orient's Golden Triangle.  With poppies growing ubiquitously around the world it was a clear strategy at controlling the supply and price of opioids by a Plutocracy.

    William Tager who would shoot and kill NBC media technician, Campbell Theron Montgomery in 1991,  was widely believed to have been the instigator of the Rather attack on Park Avenue in 1986.  Rather identified Tager from a mug shot photo following his arrest for the Montgomery murder.

     Paul Allman’s characterization of the Rather incident as a “riddle” is not the only one surrounding Dan Rather.  There is with the Ellington Field memo story, the claims that the 2004 Peabody Award for Dan Rather and Mary Mapes’ “breaking the Abu Ghraib story,” when Amnesty International reported the problems there in 2003 (a claim that was later clarified by adding "on television") and there was Dan’s co-ownership of the Tecolote Ranch, Spanish for “Owl”, in Las Vegas, New Mexico with Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld.   In November 2015 the Jon Meachum book, Destiny and Power in which GWB's father, GHWB, essentially ran over and flattened the Rumsfeld and Cheney contributions to the GWB legacy in less than a month after the James Vanderbilt film, Truth, was released on October 16.   That movie release did not include Texas theaters until just before the release of Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush.   Truth  is the film about the GWB Air National Guard AWOL and memos that became known as "Rathergate"....the  story based on Mapes' book Truth and Duty: The Press, The President and the Privilege of Power. 
     There is more.   There are other riddles spinning around Dan Rather.... riddles surrounding the life Donald Barthelme and their other Houston connections.

SUPER-SLEUTHS WANTED
 

    We are asking for your help in solving the Rather/Barthelme riddle, but new information has been provided by investigative journalist and occasional contributor, Shirley Locke Holmes, who has noted the following:

• Barthleme worked at the De Menil backed Houston Museum of Contemporary Art. The De Menil fortune came from oil exploration and the first charting machine that made oil exploration efficient for Schlumberger Oil, the De Menil company.  Houston, Texas is the heart of the world’s fossil fuel empire pumping the technology for fossil fuel extraction worldwide.  It is the epicenter of petrochemical engineering and its accompanying money flow like the Texas Medical Center is the heart of the world’s heart research. 

• When Gordon Gray, father of Bush family attorney, C. Boyden Gray, headed the Congressional committee that stripped Robert Oppenheimer of his national security clearance after heading up the Manhattan Project, Houston became ground zero for the attack on the high profile atomic scientist who desired not to build the more powerful hydrogen bomb, but to use nuclear energy for high efficiency electric power generation like that which Houston-based Enron manipulated with the pricing of gas reserves in California.  With deregulation arriving as a Clinton gift in 1999 to the Bush administration, California under Governor Gray Davis of the family of William Rhodes Davis, the focus of Dale Harrington’s book, William Rhodes Davis: Nazi Agent of Influence, California became Enron's piggy bank with Kenneth Lay seriouiosly considered as the leading candidate as GWB's energy czar. 
• The chief witnesses against J. Robert Oppenheimer were Rice University’s Dr. Kenneth Pitzer and William Liscum Borden.  Often argued that nuclear energy is too dangerous for domestic energy production it has been used for decades to fuel the U.S. Navy’s largest carriers and their powerful nuclear arsenals at sea.  Engineer, Kenneth Pitzer, was working on high octane jet fossil fuels for the aviation industry at the time that he witnessed against Oppenheimer, a conflict of interest as inherent as CBS's decision to have Dick Thornburgh investigate the Rather and Mapes' Ellington Field story.  
• Dominique De Menil and her husband,  John,  befriended the owner of Houston’s Brazos Book Store, Karl Kilian.   Karl L. Kilian was married to Kathleen Campbell Kilian who co-owned property in Houston with Marion Knox Barthelme, the wife of Donald Barthelme as evidenced in the Harris County records (T036313, 5/22/98) as both Marion Knox Bartheleme and Julie K D Kilian (perhaps Julie Kathleen Davidson Kilian?) both appear as "grantees" on a Cresmere Place property.
• Marian Carr Knox was the secretary of Colonel Jerry Bryan Killian (spelled like Karl Kilian, but with two “ll”’s) who came to the defense of the contents of the Dan Rather memos in 2004, but asserting that the memos were not the originals and used language not common to the Texas National Guard.

• With Ellington Field, Houston being known for its connections to the CIA as well as to General Claire Chennault whose Flying Tiger’s served the American Volunteer Group or AVG in China, and continuing the name as a privatized  airline for shuttling  CIA supplies under the name Flying Tiger Airline and with Col. Jerry Killian being GWB’s direct supervisor.  Julie Kathleen Kilian and Harry and Kathleen Carr Kilian used the same probate attorney in Houston, Philip Donisi (case 256906 and 323686, respectively in the Harris County Probate records), but the 70ish Kathleen Davidson Carr Killian appears to have significant ties to Karl Laurence Kilian and to Julie Kilian.

•  Employed at the Houston Contemporary Art Museum where Donald Barthelme was the Director was the graphic artist, Mark Lombardi, who in 2000 had published an artistic flow chart of the Iran-Contra network in Houston, a subject upon which the Houston Post reporter, Peter Brewton had been working in 1992 when his book, The Mafia, CIA and George Bush, having been previously contracted with Simon & Schuster publisher of Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men.    Alice Mayhew, their editor at Simon & Schuster, was assigned the editing task on the Brewton book when it was suddenly derailed, leaving Brewton’s impeccable research without a publisher before the 1992 election….the same year that the FinCEN investigation that was set up to probe Saudi influence peddling in the U.S. and with GWB’s Air National Guard roommate, James Reynolds Bath, in its crosshairs.  Bath was the President of Houston’s Ellington Field’s airplane fuel concession whose partner was Bracewelll & Giuliani attorney, William E. King, and Bath had helped the Saudi royal banker, Khalid Bin Mahfouz, to purchase the nearby Houston Gulf Manor Airport for Salem Bin Laden, the older brother and first-born heir of the Bin Laden family fortune.
• Salem Bin Laden died in 1988 in Cibolo, Texas in an ultra-light plane crash that was reported by CBS's celebrated investigative reporter, Lowell Bergman, the hero of the film, The Insider, which led to the dismantling of big tobacco's bamboozle of the American medical and health system.  Big tobacco's industry leaders were along with Brown & Williamson, RJ Reynold's whose chief heirs were Gordon Gray and son, C. Boyden Gray.  Lowell Bergman reported that Salem Bin Laden had died piloting his BAC-111 when he died in an ultra-light, a blatant misreporting by CBS's leading journalist.  After 911 the Bin Laden's Houston Gulf Manor Airport, the favorite airport of NASA's astronauts and their private planes, was sold and razed.

• Following Mark Lombardi's death in 2000, reportedly a hanging suicide in New York City, Mark Lombardi’s one color pin and ink drawings of the Iran-Contra, BCCI and dark alliances and money laundering network went on exhibit at New York’s Whitney Museum with several FBI agents visiting the display.   The FBI's interest in the show added to the increased notoriety to both the exhibit and the death of Barthelme’s former assistant at the De Menil art museum in Houston, Mark Lombardi.  “It was like there was a literary, artistic and journalistic pipeline from Park Avenue, Madison Avenue and Broadway to Houston, Texas, but why?" asked Shirley Locke Holmes who thought that it may have been to send a signal to anyone else seeking to hang a sign on the Iran-Contra debacle like Gary Webb had done with his work at the San Jose Mercury News and his book handled by NY agency, Lord Literistic,  through his agent Philipa Brophy.
• After Don Barthelme’s death, Marion Knox Barthelme married John Franklin Fort, III a major U.S. industry mogul.  He preceded Dennis Kozlowski at Tyco, the multi-national U.S. company that in 2000 had purchased Malinkrodt Inc., the centrally located, St. Louis, Missouri company that had been one of the major purifiers of high grade uranium for the Manhattan Project whose leader, J. Robert Oppenheimer, would be sidelined by the testimony of Rice University’s President Kenneth Pitzer as previously mentioned.  Malinkrodt was also one of a handful of U.S. companies with a license to legally import opium for legitimate medicinals.  When Tyco’s Koslowski came under fire for mismanagement, John F. Fort, a Tyco Director, whom many said would have known the level and extent of Koslowski’s misdeeds, was brought back to manage the troubled company.
• John Franklin Fort, III was the grandson of the Governor of New Jersey who in the first quarter of the 20^th Century had a stellar reputation for honesty and integrity, but lamented that the corruption that defined New Jersey’s Boardwalk Empire era expanded during his tenure.

    Is it purely coincidental that  Marian Carr Knox, the Ellington Field secretary of Col. Jerry Killian have very similar names to  Marion Knox Barthelme Fort and that  Col. Jerry Killian and the De Menil protégé’ Karl L. Kilian of the favorite jaunt of Don Barthelme in Houston, the Brazos Bookstore, spelling their names so similarly and why should Americans care?

    Perhaps you are an expert in actuarial sciences or statistics or gaming theory and can tell us the likelihood that there would be in the same city of Houston, Texas  two women with the first name of “Marion” with an “a” and an "o" with such close associations with someone named “Killian” or “Kilian” with one or two “L’s”.   As Shirley Locke Holmes has said “Perhaps your name is Kenneth and you know what the frequency is.”

      Help Shirley Locke Holmes and this author, Alexander DeLarge, solve the Rather/Mapes and Marian Carr Knox/Marion Knox Barthelme Fort and the  Kilian/Killian riddle.



ADDEMDUM:  We received the following letters from the author of The Mafia, CIA and George Bush, Peter Brewton, attorney and journalism professor at Texas Tech University on February 9th, 2016.  He had written the father of Patrick Carr, a 23 year old young man who had worked in Austin, Texas for the owners of Ranch 616, Ellas' and Rather Sweet, co-owned with Dan Rather's cousin, Rebecca Rather. Patrick Carr was killed in Houston near Ellington Field on the night of December 10, 2000 the anniversary of the resignation of Gary Webb from the San Jose Mercury News and the later anniversary of Webb's supposed suicide in California on December 10, 2004 in a senario that was as illogical and unbelievable as that of Patrick Carr in Houston.   Patrick Carr shared the same name as the son of Mrs. Marion Carr Knox, the secretary of Col. Jerry Killian who typed the original memos upon which the Mapes/Rather memos were based.  Marion's son had defended her against the threatening visit of Dick Thornburgh and a media whitewashing in 2004 after the 60 Minutes story and her interview aired.  Brewton's 1992 book had joined though impeccable investigative journalism the connections between GHWB, the S&L scandal and the Iran-Contra network in Houston.  Brewton was initially signed with Simon & Schuster and promised Alice Mayhew as his editor, the editor of the Washington Post reporters Woodward & Bernstein's editor on All the President's Men.  Brewton has maintained that it was ploy to keep his book out of print until after the 1992 election.

The letter noted the role that Stacey Keach's character, Col. Bill Burkett, who provided the false memos upon which Marion Carr Knox commented and was interviewed by Rather and aired by 60 Minutes on September 15, 2004, but whose story was omitted from the film, played in the reality of the 2000 election year.  Col. and Mrs. Burkett told Mapes that the reason they had not come forward with the memos in 2000 was because they feared for their lives.  "This established the base-line for anyone who is near a U.S. Presidential election in these times and the essential truth of life in America, today," said the letter.

These letters re. the Vanderbilt/Redford 2015 film "TRUTH" read:

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Later the same day we received a letter responding to the 11:04 a.m. email indicating an intentional botch job on both the memo and the Vanderbilt film.   Brewton agreed CBS owed professional journalism a good deal more than the Thornburgh committee.  It owed the truth.  Brewton did not believe, however, that Rather or Mapes were anything other than "outsmarted".   WHC took issue based on Mapes' and Rathers' embrace of the Vanderbilt story line.  Nixon was impeached on the word of "Deep Throat" and no memos at all!

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